jenthoven

Damn, 3.5 million users?? Congratulations. That's a lot of lightning rods.

[Julia again] Y'all should read the article! These examples of "lightning striking" absolutely happens to people that don't work hard for it. But knowing and appreciating the role of chance doesn't mean that hard work doesn't pay off, because hard work can make you more likely to experience a stroke of luck.

[This is Julia, the OC] In some ways, this article is a response to this sentiment. It's true that luck is an important factor, but you can make your own luck through hard work. Being successful with startups is not like winning the lottery, because lottery winners just sit around holding a ticket. Startup founders are constantly working to attract more luck - or lightning - to themselves.

When I was in college, I interviewed for an internship with the CIA. The 2012 interview was for a 2014 summer internship, and they told me I couldn’t smoke pot between now and then. Given how many talented coders I knew at Stanford who had smoked pot at least once in a year, that seemed insane to me.

Instead, I went to work at Apple where people practically smoked in the office.

Hey, we're using a basic MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node) and using FFMPEG on the back end

This is Julia, the OC. I'm glad it was helpful! I've noticed that international (outside of the US) users especially tend to look for Paypal or alternatives to CC. Something to keep in mind.

[This is Julia, the OC]: We started integrating with Paypal and basically gave up because of the engineering effort required. Vs Stripe, which has a great web and iOS app and has been seamless from day 1.

[This is Julia, the OC] If you're interested, we wrote a blog post on why we included the "I don't want to pay" option and our reflection on the results. It's the first blog article on our website. Also the fact that you would call this "information rape" is kind of disgusting...The user doesn't have to give us information, can create a new Google Account if they want to, and are only asked for read-only access to their name and email. Happy International Women's Day!

Google Accounts are free and simple to create, so if a user doesn't want to "link everything together" they can create a new separate account that they only use for Kapwing. Plus, we're aren't "linking" to your Facebook/Google data; we're just reading your name and email from your account.

We decided to rely on Google and Facebook for three reasons: 1. It's technically easier, and since so few users care about needed to sign in with one of them it's a low-priority feature request to add email sign in. 2. My co-founder and I worked on Google's identity team for a year. The fact is that passwords SUCK - people hate them and they lead to a huge amount of friction in UX. Reducing the number of passwords that a user needs to remember is a huge benefit. 3. Having user's "real" identity helps with validating credit card transactions, sending follow-up receipts and confirmations, and personalizing the site. If we do one day become a social network, we're less likely to be taken over by bots.

This is an awesome cheat sheet. I’ve been struggling with the constant aspect ratio problem!

Right, but isn’t this true about many other fields that women do go into, like art, design, medicine, journalism, earth sciences, finance, research, etc? In these fields, the “meat” of the job is also analytical and done alone, but they’re still seen as more social than CS.

No I do not. You should not draw rigorous scientific conclusions of any kind from this article, as I say in the post haha.

A few thoughts from Julia (the OC) 24 hours after this post caught on: 1. Thank you all for the kind words and thoughts - The Kapwing chat box has been full of supportive and kind messages this morning. 2. I didn’t intend to solicit pity; annoying users are just one small challenge on the way to growing an Internet company and are easy to avoid, thanks to the Drift messaging platform and pseudonyms. But it is one example of a small thing that steepens the path to success for women founders. 3. The discussions in these comments are, for the most part, insightful and interesting. Even though my users and my experience are not representative of everyone’s, I appreciate the conversations this post has started around user behavior on the internet.

Hey this is Julia, the post’s author. Sorry there’s no legend; I kind of included it in the title of the graph but orange was “Rude or trolling messages” and blue was “Sexual harassment or heckling”

Yes, I'm using the word "messages" loosely in the article. Here, "messages" = message threads or sessions. - We got 2,100 message threads over the last three months. - We got 14 message threads or abusive sessions per week, a small fraction of the 2,100 overall

The average "abusive session" contained only about three or four messages, not 6-7. Otherwise, your math is right.

We didn't include "Go away" or "get out of my way" or even "shut up" in the count of rude messages. I only counted messages where a user swore, called me a name, or said something clearly aggressive or mean.

>>Why bring up some other site? Sorry for not being clear. "Drift" is the name of the messaging widget we use to support Kapwing's chat bot. If a user responds to the welcome message on Kapwing, they're automatically prompted for their email (kind of in a side bar to the message box). I feel like this makes the chat bot a bit more annoying to users who choose to respond to the initial message.

>> how does that fact justify using this particular dark UI pattern? We just made a product call and decided that the benefits, both for us and for our users, of having a chat box outweighed the annoyance. When people have problems using our tool, they really want help, and it isn't that difficult for the rest of our site visitors to swipe away or ignore the chat box.

No - I counted each thread separately. A "burst of messages" counts as 1

Yes, I noticed that people hated when they thought they were talking to a bot. [This is Julia, the OC.] Sometimes I would respond to a sequence of four or five messages from a user, and they would immediately stop messaging, as if they didn’t realize a human was there. I tried that tactic for a while - a user would message me or Rachel some inappropriate demand and I would respond with “Absolutley not.” Many users would stop messaging, but some would get even more fired up and become really aggresssive or threatening.

So I stopped responding to any message that was inappropriate, mean, or nonsense. It’s a waste of time and energy when you’re trying to grow the company.

Hey - I totally agree it can be annoying, especially since Drift asks users to enter their email address and people are worried about spam. So it’s a tradeoff between annoyance at the pop up and the support users get when they have problems. Our website is a video editing tool, so we decided that it’s more important to have someone to answer questions than to avoid “peeing off” users.

And, regardless of how annoying a chat box is, the findings of this article still stand...[This is Julia btw, the author of this post]

Right. I was a PM on Google Image Search and, from what I experienced on the team, would assume this is related to the Getty Relationship, not for users’ benefit

My comment was in response to your initial point that "“Many girls decide at around age 12 ... to get a husband that will do all the heavy lifting". I don't think it's because they're "smarter" because in the long run it costs them opportunity, power, wealth, etc that people in the workforce acquire over time. There might be an element related to a partnership at home, but as Sandberg points out in Lean In, this should affect women's decisions in their 30s, not their decisions about their college major when they're 18.

I'm a female founder who majored in CS and left my PM job at Google to start a company, so I have "observed the choices" of many young females considering engineering. It's not enough to say that "women are just choosing the wrong thing" - we need to find the underlying cause of those choices if we want to shift the demographics.

This actually goes to my point - PMing is more social than coding, and there are more female PMs and UX designers so those fields also feel more social for the women in them (easier to make friends, more feminine community).

Re:success - In my eyes, success is when women have better representation as engineers, makers, and technologists. A PM and UX designer could be a great engineer and technologist, although it's hard to keep your technical chops when you're not coding regularly. So I agree...

Fair, I apologize for generalizing. You're right that Google is an outlier in this way. But I still think that there's a perception that CS is more anti-social than it actually is, and a perception that other professions are more social than they actually are.

I’m a CS graduate and female founder. I disagree with many parts of this essay, but I actually agree with this part: “The sex difference in interest in people extends to a more general interest in living things, which would explain why women who are interested in science are much more likely to pursue a career in biology or veterinary medicine than computer science“

I believe that, at age 18, women have more sophisticated social lives and care more than boys do about relationships with people. But I think the perception that CS is less beneficial towards people or that technologist don’t work with people as often as other professionals is false. My job as a PM at Google was incredibly social, and I felt had a huge impact on “living things”, much more so than my female friend’s role as a psychology researcher or operations associate at an insurance company. There’s a belief in society that all CS grads do is sit in caves alone and make video games, whereas the truth is that they have beautiful offices, close-knit teams, a lifestyle with time for friends, a lot of influence, and a huge impact on real people’s lives through the software they create.

Now, a related problem is that CS actually is less social for woman than in it is for men. I had very few friends in my advanced classes, whereas the dudes took those classes together in packs. I benefited a huge amount from women in CS community at my university because I felt like I knew more people in my classes, could sit, chat, and work with them. IMO, all of the dollars going towards women in STEM that this author criticized are and should continue to target these two problems: that CS is perceived as less to do with “living things” and that it actually is less social for girls because there isn’t a strong community.

1. This just begs the question: why are men more ambitious and successful? 2. Clearly, this “decision” that women make when they’re 12 doesn’t effect them in many other fields, including life sciences, law, etc, because they are the majority in those fields.

I worked on Google Image Search, and my team was responsible for image quality across all of Search. There are some checks on image similarity, although “de-duplication” is applied in smart ways for different queries. To my knowledge, there isn’t an algorithm that tries to pick “non-stock” images.

In general, Google/page rank favors sites that other people have favored (by linking to and talking about on the internet). It seems that original content is generally more “link-worthy” than copied content, so that might explain your observation.

Yes, absolutely. Apparently you can become a “better” lucid dreamer by practicing and trying to stay asleep when you feel like you’re about to wake up. Sleep is wild!

How did you come up with the text (the actual Valentines sayings)? Is it drawing from a list you made up?